you're the message i was heeding
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: Stiles Hale: Schrodinger's widow.


**Story:** you're the message i was heeding

**Summary:** Stiles Hale: Schrödinger's widow.

**Notes:** I actually feel a little bad about having written this because it's hopelessly self-indulgent and not really that good, but, well, I'm posting it anyway. Warning for character death—off-screen—and a lot of emotional repression and also heavily overutilization of the word "what."

* * *

Stiles wakes up hating everything. She feels swollen and achy, like a balloon filled with bruises, and she has to pee and her throat feels like it was doused in rancid oil and lit on fire. It's like the worst possible case of the Mondays with an extra bit of _fuck you, courtesy of the universe at large_ thrown in. She ends up staying in bed for a while, arms crossed over her breasts even though the pressure just adds to her general malcontent, and she tries to count all of the speckles on the popcorn ceiling as she waits for her life to stop sucking quite so hard.

It doesn't, unsurprisingly. It hasn't in the past six months, even though Stiles has basically woken up to this exact same scene every day since May.

Stiles is a restless sleeper even when she's emotionally stable, so it's business as usual that she'd apparently kicked off the comforter and flat sheet at some point and now they're crumpled up at her feet like used tissues. Used tissue is a good metaphor, Stiles thinks lazily. She has moments where she feels a _lot_ like a used tissue, usually when a bodily fluid is leaking out of one of her many orifices.

The cotton sheets are freezing anywhere not covered by Stiles' immediate body, and her skin has pebbled from the cold.

"It's Tuesday," she says to the ceiling. She gives up on the sternly crossed arms in favor of gingerly lacing her fingers together and resting them on her stomach, and then she thanks the little baby Jesus when she doesn't immediately begin to projectile vomit. "December 20th. I'm supposed to go over to the house this afternoon to help put the tree up, but let's be frank here, it's going to be an unmitigated disaster. Natalie is going to get dictatorial and Erin is going to get pissy and then tinsel is going to be _everywhere_."

Casually, like there's someone she needs to fool, Stiles affects a shrug. "S'cool, though, it's not like I'm new to this rodeo."

Stiles doesn't say, _I miss you_, or _Every day when I wake up I forget that you won't be here_, or _I can't do this without you, fuck you for doing this to me_; she's not quite that unhinged.

Besides, the first two are so obvious that they don't really need to be said. Stiles wakes up and the first thing she does is nestle to the left, feet scrambling for a warm thigh so she can bury her icicle toes against it. Stiles still talks to her dead husband every morning, as if he's just in the bathroom adjoining their bedroom, dunking his head under the tap after a morning run. Stiles drives to Beacon Hills Cemetery on the first and third Wednesday of every month and spends two hours there, weeding around first her mother's chrysanthemums and then Derek's tulips.

Derek is dead and Stiles has to do this without him, because otherwise no one will.

"I won't clean it up," she continues. "Your parents are just going to have to be satisfied with picking tinsel out of their drinks for the next twelve months." This gives her the satisfying mental image of Erin, grinning widely, bits of tinsel woven around her teeth like braces. She can almost hear the first three Flo Rida jokes Laura is going to make.

That's it as far as morning updates go on Tuesday, November 20th; three seconds later, Stiles is groaning and catapulting herself out of bed so she doesn't end up with puke all over the carpet. How is it actually possible for a human being to feel this gross for such a prolonged period of time? Biology _sucks_, Stiles doesn't care how much time Beatrice spends waxing rhapsodic about the crazy genetic mutation stuff she does in her lab.

"Thank god you're the only spawn I'm going to have," she tells her stomach when she's resting between heaves, her forehead propped against the side of the cabinet under the bathroom sink. "There's no way I could handle this disaster a second time. If a divine power decides to grace you with a brother or sister, they're growing in a test tube."

The baby's foot presses firmly against the bottom of Stiles' stomach and whoops, there she goes again. Forget about Linda Blair, Stiles has got _Exorcist_-level projectile vomiting locked down. She would win all the puke-based awards, even the ones from Nickelodeon that involve dunking someone in a vat of slime and _ugh_, gross.

Everything in the bathroom is tiled green and white and it's achingly cold, soothing against the hot press of her sweaty skin. Even as Stiles rolls her head and rests her temple against a particularly icy patch of birch wood paneling, she would give anything to have a large, familiar hand card through her hair and dig knuckles into the tense muscles of her shoulders. Stiles hasn't cried in three months, even though she's pregnant and should theoretically be a faucet with limbs, and she doesn't want to break her record just because of a little puking.

_It's okay_, she thinks, too tired to bother verbalizing the lie. She doesn't really have much of a choice; it's basically become Stiles' mantra over the past few months. _It has to be okay_.

* * *

In fifty years Stiles is probably going to be an old woman in her house on the edge of town and people are going to call her the Widow Hale, because that's how towns like Beacon Hills work, but for now she's mostly "poor Stiles' and "dear girl" and "that sad Mrs. Hale." People tiptoe around her, even while they're simultaneously tripping over themselves to open doors for her and help her up the stairs and get her things off of tall shelves.

Maybe Stiles will be able to appreciate, at some point, that all it took for the town to stop tagging her as the weird half of the Derek Hale-Stiles Stiliniski dynamic was for her to get knocked up and her husband to be hit by a car, but that point is not today or likely to occur in the next decade. It's possible that she'll be recovered enough by the time her kid is ten, but considering how fucked up her dad still gets on the anniversary of her mom's death, eight years later, Stiles will probably never be at the point where she can joke about Derek's death.

"Mrs. Hale!" Paul Oppenheimer pauses in the act of opening the door to Stella's and waves. "How are you doing today?"

"Just fine, Paul," Stiles says, valiantly attempting not to waddle her way down the street from where she's parked her Jeep outside of the hardware store. "How are you doing?"

"I'm great!" Paul beams at Stiles, but there's a forced levity and a vague hint of panic lingering around the edge of his smile. "We miss you. Mr. Harris isn't really, um, the same." Paul is still holding the door to Stella's open, clearly waiting for Stiles to get closer. She grumpily begins to walk faster and, yep, there is now a distinct waddle to her step. Fantastic.

At least her sophomores like her better than Adrian Harris. That's a small comfort; it's sort of like them preferring her to Lucifer, or Rush Limbaugh. "I'm sure you'll all do fine," Stiles lies. "Are you planning on taking AP with me next year?"

Paul smiles toothily, his panic smoothed over by Stiles' blatant falsehood. "Yep!" A lot of the sophomores choose not to take chemistry again, even for the AP credit, which is why Stiles has been aggressively campaigning that the school change it's policy of requiring that students take standard chemistry before AP. Or at least, she had been, before she'd found herself with more life insurance than she'd really wanted, Derek's trust fund, and a half-painted nursery.

"That's nice," Stiles says, slightly winded by her half-hearted dash. She finally makes it to the door and lets Paul wave her through as though he hasn't been waiting to do it. Stella's is packed for a Tuesday morning, but school is out for winter break and nothing says 'Please, God, carry me through this last-minute Christmas shopping' like a bracing cup of Stella's cocoa and a stack of pancakes.

"Morning, Stiles!" says Stella cheerfully. She's pouring coffee into a thick white diner mug for Stiles' dad, who's perched on one of the stools at the counter and poking at a bowl of oatmeal like it's going to morph into a monster and bite his hand off. "Let me get you a cup. Move over, Jeff."

Jeff Oppenheimer obligingly slides over a seat. Seeing him dressed in deputy's khaki makes Stiles feel old; he was in her first AP class, back when she and Derek had just returned from Berkeley, and now he's a couple of years out of BHCC and working for her dad at the station. "Thanks, Jeff," she says to him, and then to her dad, "Glad to see you're choosing to obey my instructions."

"I was told the only thing on the menu I could eat was dry toast or oatmeal," her dad replies. "With the choice of a festive holiday fruit salad on the side, that is."

"I love Stella's festive holiday fruit salad," Stiles says, because she does. Who doesn't like strawberries cut into stars and arranged on top of slices of melon cut to look like a Christmas tree? Derek had loved it; he'd always hum the first few bars of _Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree_ as he speared blueberries with his fork. Derek hadn't really done singing; his aim had been to make Stiles laugh.

Stiles settles her bulk on the open stool and accepts the mug of herbal tea that Stella slides in her direction. As she strips off her hat and gloves, she pretends not to notice the small dish of turkey sausage her dad is casually elbowing into Missy Quentin's plate of waffles to his left. It's the holidays, after all, and besides, and her dad has disgustingly good luck charming any woman between the ages of 35 and 65 in Beacon Hills into giving him the occasional pass on Stiles' strict diet.

"Well, this is for you, then," Stella says, and she plunks down a plate of fruit salad. This one is cantaloupe slices arranged into a menorah, with melon as the candlesticks and pineapple as the flames. Since it's the fourth day of Chanukkah, there are only five chunks of pineapple; Stiles rations them accordingly between bites of cantaloupe.

"Are we still on for tonight?" she asks her dad. "I know you don't get off shift until six, but there should still be plenty of the healthier cookies left."

Her dad groans theatrically and chokes down his mouthful of oatmeal. "Your in-laws are crazy," he tells Stiles gravely. "Worse than your mother's family, and that's really saying something considering your aunt Ewa."

"Dad, when I married into the Hales, you knew what you'd be in for," she replies just as seriously. "You don't say no to Beatrice Hale about Christmas."

Her dad looks like he's seriously considering taking his life into his own hands anyway, and then he sighs and takes a swig of his coffee. Stiles tries not to be jealous and mostly succeeds; she's had a long few months to get used to the lack of caffeine in her life. "I could try," he says mutinously, and then he smiles and, putting down his mug, leans over to kiss the top of Stiles' head. "Yeah, I'll come by."

Stiles lets him rest his hand against the back of her head, his thumb pressed against the base of her ponytail. She knows that she looks like her mom and the older she gets, the worse the similarities become; she knows that her being pregnant is bringing back the kinds of memories that used to wreck her dad, back in the early days when Stiles was away at school and her dad worked instead of coming home.

When he sighs inaudibly and pulls back his hand, Stiles sticks her fork into a slice of melon and thinks, _at the Christmas party hop_, and then stuffs the fruit into her mouth and chews it faster than she should, so the muscles in her face will keep her from doing something idiotic like crying in the middle of Stella's and landing her a starring role in the Beacon Hills gossip mill for the rest of the week.

* * *

The first person to come across Stiles is actually Scott McCall. He'd been in Stiles' AP class last year and he'd sent her an email over the summer to tell her that he'd gotten a perfectly respectable 4 on the AP exam, which apparently had surprised him but hadn't shocked Stiles at all.

"Scott," says Stiles, struggling to her feet and trying not to look pathetic—although to judge by the slightly constipated look on Scott's face, she's not really succeeding—with a hand on her belly. "I would ask what you're doing in the preserve, but since it's going to save my butt, I won't split hairs." Stiles knows that Scott is allergic to everything around them, namely trees and grass, but she'd been a bit of a dumb teenager, so she gets the urge to surround yourself with dangerous objects.

"I'm…sorry?" says Scott hesitantly. The constipated expression gets worse.

"I'm not going to tell on you to your mom, Scott," Stiles assures him. She makes it upright and mostly vertical and then groans because all of the muscles in her lower back have simultaneously decided to go on strike. She hisses through her teeth and presses a fist against the knotted muscle. "I don't know what happened, but my car sort of stopped in the middle of the road and now it won't start."

Scott nods, twice, his eyes stuck on Stiles' face. "Won't start," he says wheezily.

"Are you okay?" Stiles asks. "You aren't having an attack, are you?" Scott is wearing tight jeans and a tighter t-shirt and there's no way he's smuggling an inhaler anywhere in that outfit; he looks kind of like the cover of _Out_, down to the fact that he's not wearing shoes. "Scott," says Stiles slowly, aware that he's yet to do much more than breathe heavily in her direction, "is everything all right?"

"I'm sorry, who _are_ you?" Scott demands, which is when Isaac Lahey—same grade, but Stiles had him for first period honors chem—bursts out of the tree line behind him. He's also shoeless, because apparently that's now the happening thing for Beacon Hills' teenage population, but Isaac isn't wearing a shirt either.

"Ookay," Stiles says slowly, watching as Isaac skids into place next to Scott. "I would really have thought you'd remember me, Scott, since I just finished writing you an exceptional letter of recommendation and it's not like there are a lot of pregnant chemistry teachers wandering around Beacon Hills. There's basically just me."

"Scott, what the hell," Isaac breathes. "She—is that—do you?"

"Yeah," Scott says, putting a hand out and gently shoving Issac behind him. He does it automatically, kindly, and firmly. "I smell it."

Stiles is fairly certain that neither Scott nor Isaac have joined a cult or become substance abusers since last she saw them, and last she saw them was Thursday, when they were elbowing each other in the snack food aisle at Raley's in a furious argument over kettle corn versus movie theater-style popcorn, so she's not really sure what to make of whatever the hell is going on right now.

One of Stiles' least favorite things about being pregnant—and it's impressive, really, that it beat out the way her body just sort of leaks fluids now whenever the hell it wants—is the vulnerability. Stiles has never really been a Lara Croft, or even much of a Hermione Granger, but she's always been a fast runner and she's fairly competent with mace and a handgun, even if she'd turned down her dad's offer to get her a concealed carry permit for that latter.

But now, of course, Stiles can barely walk without feeling like an impending earthquake, let alone run, and even though Derek's death has fucked her up in a million of little tiny incalculable ways, it's also left Stiles achingly, obviously alone, and she's not going to do anything to put her baby at risk.

"Maybe I'm all right," Stiles says, trying to inch back towards to where her handbag is draped over the hood of her car. "You know, I think, um, I'll just try for dispatch again and hopefully the line won't be busy." The line will probably still be unreachable, since Stiles doesn't appear to have service out here, but she doesn't want to advertise that to Scott and Isaac. They could've theoretically been replaced with pod people between now and Thursday; it's not like Stiles knows how they spend their weekends.

"Who are you?" Scott says again, and it's not him being a shit. For one thing, Scott's fairly bad at being a shit; Stiles knows, because she teaches teenagers for a living. For another, he looks genuinely concerned.

"I'm your chemistry teacher, Scott," Stiles says, enunciating slowly.

"Mr. Harris is our chemistry teacher," Isaac says from behind Scott, and he has the same confused tilt to his head, like he's trying to place someone he's only met once or twice. Bringing up Harris is kind of a low blow, though.

"Just because he's subbing while I'm out on leave doesn't mean I'm not your teacher, Isaac," Stiles chides. She's not the greatest at projecting authority, probably because she's miniscule and pale and covered in moles, as well as _really fucking pregnant_, but she's a professional-grade chider. "I mean, the fact that you're both seniors now and taking physics is what really makes me no longer your teacher, but I'd like to think that our bond has extended past such petty concerns."

If Scott keeps this up, Stiles is seriously just not going to mail the last of his recommendation letters. She'll do it; she keeps a mean grudge.

"What are you _talking_ about?" Isaac asks, in a low sort of growl, and Scott says, "I think I should probably call Derek, dude, I think this counts as weird enough for that," which leaves Stiles still confused and still by the side of the road with a broken car and two former students who've apparently forgotten her in the past four days.

"I think you'd better leave," she says to them firmly.

"We're not going anywhere, lady," Isaac drawls.

Okay, seriously, _no_. Stiles may be young and pregnant and female, but she does not fucking deal with disrespect from her students. "It's _Mrs. Hale_, Mr. Lahey," she says coldly. "I may no longer have you in my classroom but you're still a student at my school."

Isaac's face turns a weird, splotchy kind of pink and he stops posturing like an extra on _True Blood_. "Dude," he garbles at Scott.

"Holy _shit_," Scott says, and drops his phone. From the other end of the line, Stiles can hear furiously low-toned shouting, but all Scott says is, "Did you just say Hale?" as if it's some kind of shock that a member of the Hale family is on the road that leads to the Hale residence.

Stiles is going to burn Scott's remaining recommendation letters when she gets home and take particular enjoyment in watching _Scott is very talented at isolating important information and prioritizing it_ disintegrate into ash.

"Yes, Scott," she says, rolling her eyes heavenward. "I know everyone likes to pretend that teachers don't have personal lives, but I do, in fact, occasionally visit my in-laws. What, did you think I was out here with a broken-down car for a Tuesday afternoon drive?"

One of the teenagers says, "_In-laws_?!" in a torturous, confused undertone, and the other one groans. Stiles doesn't know which, because she's judging the distance between her and her purse. She's not going to be the jackass who hits a seventeen-year-old asthmatic with a face full of mace, but it's not like Isaac has asthma.

Before Stiles gets an opportunity, though, there's crashing through the undergrowth as if a hereto-unknown boar infestation in the Beacon Hills Preserve is choosing now to reveal itself. Stiles is kind of willing to leave Isaac and Scott to its tender mercies, except—it's not a boar.

For a long second, Stiles think she's hallucinating. He looks like Derek, but more tired, wearing pants that are the kind of tight Derek had stopped wearing after they'd graduated college and become real adults with real responsibilities. His hair is heavily gelled and he isn't wearing the big hipster glasses Derek had needed when he was too lazy to put in his contacts, which was pretty much all the time, but Stiles had fallen asleep and woken up next to the same face for seven years, and she knows it like she knows the mirrored reflection of her own; better, even, because Stiles would always rather look at Derek than herself.

Of course, it can't be Derek, even if it looks like him and Stiles' chest is aching from the sudden reminder. The Hales have so many cousins that Stiles still has yet to meet all of them, even though she was practically raised at the house in Beacon Hills. It makes sense that one of them looks so much like Derek that Stiles is having a hard time breathing properly. Her lungs appear to be doing something they shouldn't; the air in front of her face looks like it's swimming.

"What the hell is going on, Scott," the man snaps, and oh god he even has Derek's voice. Sometimes, when Stiles is generally overwhelmed by the overindulgent stares of the people in town, she'll duck into a nearby bathroom and dial Derek's voicemail at the shop just to listen to the recording. _You've reached Derek Hale at Hale Carpentry. Our normal business hours are from 10 to 4 Monday through Saturday. If you need to check up on the status of your order, please leave a message._

Standing suddenly seems an overly ambitious goal, so Stiles sort of half-collapses back onto the ground, her butt landing on the patch of dry dirt that's already been worn into a perfect seat after the last thirty minutes she spent in it, waiting for someone at the house to realize she's late and send out Erin in the truck.

"She smells like Stiles," Scott says, somewhere to Stiles' left, and Stiles can't help snorting because _yes, thank you, Scott_.

"Brilliant deduction, Mr. McCall," she says; her voice is definitely revealing twinges of hysteria. "Twelve points to Gryffindor. _I smell like myself_. Good job." The baby must decide that it wants to be part of this discussion, too, because it promptly lodges its foot into Stiles' kidney. "_Oomph_. I think someone's a little keen to join Beacon Hills pee wee soccer."

When Stiles looks up, carefully avoiding looking directly at the guy who's basically her dead husband's doppelganger, Scott has an adorable confused puppy look on his face. His eyebrows fall down over his eyes as he says, "What?"

"The baby kicked me, Scott," Stiles says, slowly. "That's generally what pregnant women mean when they make comments about soccer leagues."

"No," Isaac interrupts, "no, the other thing."

"What, like you've never heard me make a Harry Potter reference before. Isaac, I named your class' lab groups after Hogwarts Headmasters; that I'm a Potter nerd was really not that hard an inference for you to make."

"You smell like Stiles," the man says. His voice falls weirdly over her name, probably because Stiles is used to hearing it said in Derek's voice in a different way: exasperated and fond and often annoyed, but never so—blankly.

Stiles presses the heel of her right palm into her chest, trying to dislodge some of the discomfort that the fluttering edges of panic are trying to evoke. "What the hell are you even _saying_," she says. "I smell like Stiles because I _am_ Stiles, Jesus fucking Christ, how many fucking people named Stiles live in this goddamn town." The panic doesn't go away, so Stiles rubs harder. "And what the fuck does that even mean, _you smell like Stiles_. I've never even met you before."

Scott says, "_What_?!" and Isaac says, "The fuck," and the man who looks uncomfortably like Derek says, "She's not lying."

"No shit I'm not lying," Stiles mutters aggressively. "Yes, let's verbally abuse the pregnant woman sitting by the side of the road, brilliant idea."

"I'm sorry," Scott says a second later, and Stiles realizes that he's hovering at her elbow. He's moved across about twenty feet of open space really quickly, but Stiles doesn't want to be scared of her favorite student, so she lets him help her to her feet. "We're just, um, confused."

Stiles says, "Oh really, I couldn't tell," and jerks her arm free so she can brush some of the dirt off of the seat of her jeans. "I swear to God, Scott, if you're doing hallucinogens regularly, I'm just flat out not sending your letters. Forget about UCLA or vet school, that shit fucks you up for good." Stiles doesn't believe in lying to her students. "A little recreational pot, whatever, but you don't really want to start on LSD at your age unless you're willing to sacrifice a couple necessary brain cells."

Scott nods twice, jerkily, still uncomprehending, and Stiles sighs and rakes the fingers of her left hand through her hair, snagging the tie holding her hair into its usual limp ponytail and pulling it free. There are bits of leaves and dirt in her hair, because Stiles has never met a messy situation where she didn't pick up some kind of debris in her hair, but she's used to efficiently picking it out.

She's doing a fairly good job of not looking at the unidentified Hale cousin when he says, suddenly, "What is that?"

It's so blatantly threatening that Stiles almost drops her hair tie into a ditch when she jerks backwards. "What?" she says, reflecting with feeling that she never wants to hear that goddamn word out of anyone's mouth for the next twelve months, _at least_, and she's tricked into looking at him. He's staring at her hand.

"That—that's my grandmother's ring," he says, and he sounds _pissed_.

Stiles takes another step back and takes Scott with her, her arm thrown out in front of his chest. "Okay, one of Derek's cousins, then. Look, I know the ring was a point of contention, but your grandmother wanted him to have it and Beatrice put her foot down about it." The cousin actually fucking growls at Stiles, like he's a toddler, and she snaps, "Oh my _god_, grow the fuck up. I know everybody loved Meredith and there was like a month where I thought Natalie was going to shank Derek for it, but she wanted him to have it. She wanted me to have it. And you don't get to be angry about my fucking wedding ring."

Stiles hadn't realized that she was still angry about that, considering that the biggest part of that debacle, which had been when Natalie had stopped talking to either Derek or their mom for three weeks, had occurred five years ago. Bianca would probably have some kind of psychological bullshit reason for the sudden surge of resentment—related, no doubt, to Stiles' massive abandonment complex and the symbolism behind Stiles wearing the ring that has belonged to Hale matriarchs ever since Beacon Hills was a one-horse town with a bandit problem—but Bianca is presumably at home, right now, and therefore can't force Stiles to deal with her issues.

"Derek," Scott says urgently from behind Stiles' outstretched, protective arm, "you can hear that, she's telling the truth."

Stiles hates herself for it basically immediately, but she breathes, "_What_."

"She thinks she is," the man says, and he can't be Derek both because Derek is dead, has been dead for six months and Stiles weeds his grave the first and third Wednesday of every month, and because Derek had loved Stiles for her entire life and there isn't anything that Stiles can read in the man standing twelve feet away from her except exasperation and a low simmering fury.

"You're not—" Stiles tells him. Her voice is steady but high-pitched. "You—"

Does Derek have a cousin with the same name? That's kind of stupid, even for the Hales. "I'm Derek Hale," he says, "so who the hell are you?"

"I'm Stiles Hale," Stiles says, automatically, because that shit falls off of your tongue, like your social security number and your favorite player on the Giants. "Well, Mieczyslawa Stilinski-Hale, but." She shrugs, and the hysteria begins to burble in her throat. "You know. Pronunciation." She has the urge to giggle, and also maybe to claw at her face.

"That's Stiles' name," Scott says to Derek. "Mieczyslaw." He pronounces it like someone's stuck his face in a food processor. Somewhere, Stiles' grandfather is rolling in his grave and shouting to her mother about travesties.

"Seriously?" Isaac asks. "Jesus, no wonder he doesn't tell anyone."

"If he finds out that I told you he's gonna kill me, so, um, don't say anything." The fact that Scott manages to find the time to be concerned about this kid's embarrassment over his name is just so _Scott_ that the giggle breaks free. It's the bad, broken kind, like the soundtrack of Harley Quinn on _Arkham Asylum_, and Stiles has to slap both hands over her mouth because she's seconds away from flat-out bawling.

_He looks so much like Derek_.

"I have no idea what's going on," Stiles admits, "but there's a house full of people down the road who expected me twenty minutes ago, so why don't we shelve this—whatever this is until some time around, um, never." When all three of them look at her blankly, Stiles says, "That was a gentle reminder that Erin Hale is going to be driving down this road any minute now and you should probably all scram." This is usually a fairly effective threat, since everyone knows that Erin is a fucking psychopath, but it doesn't appear to penetrate.

Derek begins to look horrified. Maybe he's finally remembered that Stiles' husband died six months ago and he should be less of a judgmental asshole about the whole ring thing.

"Okay, something definitely weird is going on." Scott, talented as always at stating the obvious, has his hand hovering by her elbow again. "Um, Mrs. Hale? Nobody lives up the road."

"My _family_ lives up the road," Stiles snarls.

"No," says Isaac, and he's getting the same awful and surprised look on his face that Derek has. "They're all"—he gives Derek a quick, unhappy look—"um. Dead." Isaac isn't as unfailingly sweet as Scott—_no one _is as unfailingly sweet as Scott—but Stiles had never really thought of him as an actual asshole until this moment.

"Oh my god, this is so many levels of not okay that I am going straight to my dad and the principal and you are going to have so many required therapy hours with Bianca Morell that you're going to want to claw your eyes out." Stiles sometimes surprises herself with the level of her fury; she's not really an angry person, per se, she just sometimes gets so mad that she can't breathe properly and her hands start to shake. "What the _hell_, Isaac Lahey? You know what, forget the principal or my dad, I'm going to your _mother_."

Normally, threats to visit Penelope Lahey get Stiles immediate groveling, but Isaac blanches instead of apologizing.

It's Derek who moves first, stepping towards Stiles carefully like she's going to suddenly burst into flames from the force of her rage. It's not the first time Stiles has been treated as delicate, since she's been a pregnant widow in a small town for half of the last year, and she's turning to rip him a new one, too, but he's close enough for her to see that he has a tiny freckle two inches or so above the arch of his left eyebrow.

Everything just stops. Stiles stares at the freckle and she hears, like he's actually there, Derek's whiny, _Stop touching my face, Stiles_, and _It's just a freckle, you have like a million of them_, and she can remember perfectly the way that it would disappear when he would do his sarcastic eyebrow raise in response to something dumb Stiles had suggested, like "borrowing" Laura's car or blowing off a family dinner to have debauched married people sex on their kitchen table.

Stiles says, or at least tries to say, "_What the ever-loving motherfucking hell_," but it's just a series of endless wheezes instead of actual words. "Oh my god," she realizes she's chanting, and she holds out her hands and great, wonderful, she's crying, which is really just icing on the cake of the second that Derek pauses and then deliberately walks into her outstretched hand and even though he's wearing stupid pants and his hair looks like it might spontaneously combust if it gets near enough to open flame, it's Derek. It's her husband.

She wants to demand to know what's going on, but she's too busy crying so hard that she thinks one of her lungs might actually fall out of her mouth. Even though the tears are blurring her eyes she can tell that Derek is hugely uncomfortable and he's holding himself tensely, just inside of her reach, his hands in fists at his side.

"You _asshole_," Stiles tells him, "you were _dead_, I watched you _die_." She must get this out clearly, since Derek's shoulders become even more tense, clenching somewhere up near his ears. She hopes he's uncomfortable; he's not the one who was emotionally decimated in a hospital waiting room. She purposely tries to cry onto him, but it's like crying onto a brick wall. All of the parts of Derek that Stiles had grown used to—the parts that she'd had to learn to miss without losing a vital part of herself, in the first few months after his death when she was mostly locked up in their house, systematically making and eating macaroons that were never as good as the ones Derek had baked for her—are still missing. "What's going _on_," Stiles wails, wetly.

"I have no idea," Derek admits, and he sounds like he had when his mother had manipulated him into a corner, usually over who would make a birthday cake for one of Derek's myriad nieces and nephews. It's not exactly the least comforting thing Stiles has ever heard out of her dead husband's mouth, but it's close.

* * *

What Stiles ends up having the least trouble remembering is that he's not her husband. He's Derek, at least in name and physical presentation, and sometimes he'll say something and look slyly amused at his own wit, which is _incredibly_ Derek and makes emotion clog up Stiles' throat, but it's not—_him_. He's broken in so many places that Stiles doesn't even know where to begin to navigate. She's had her whole life to get used to—take for granted, even—that Derek loves her. Even their junior year of high school, when Derek had fallen for her hard and had no idea how to show it except to become awkward and tight-lipped and disappear for hours instead of coming over to her house to watch _X-Files_ marathons, his love had still been the strongest force in Stiles' life, even as it had adjusted from _best friend/sister_ to _I kind of want to bone you/soul mate_.

Stiles is an expert at reading the many moods of Derek Hale, even a Derek Hale who apparently broods more than he laughs and manifests his awkwardness in physical violence and is a _werewolf_, what the _fuck_, so she can tell very easily, that she makes Derek uncomfortable and he doesn't want her around.

She doesn't take it personally, since this Derek apparently gives a whole new name to emotional constipation and occasionally looks between her and the males Stiles like one of them is going to get up and waggle their genitalia in his face in order to accentuate some kind of point.

The baby fucks it all up, though. Babies kind of excel at messing up plans, so the way that the Baby Hale messes up what would otherwise be a probably uneventful trip through the multiverse shouldn't be terribly surprising.

"It's a spell," the male Stiles says from where he's buried in a couch across the room. He's been exiled there because after first being completely floored by the idea of there existing a female version of him who is both older and pregnant, he'd started asking Stiles questions and then just not stopped. Stiles can remember being hyperactive at his age, but Derek had toned down the worst of it; he'd always been the one to ask her to slow down and explain things, which had first been frustrating and then, eventually, useful when Stiles had gotten to college and her teachers had actually listened to her instead of being dismissive and unhelpful (thanks, _Harris_).

"Really," says Derek. His sarcasm is almost indistinguishable from his normal, angry tone, but Stiles can see it in his eyebrows. "Astutely observed, Stiles."

The male Stiles says, "Shut up, would you like to do this?" He's clicking the cap on and off of his highlighter with a dizzying amount of noise; Stiles, who apparently "wouldn't know a wendigo from a chupacabra" and "would probably be worse than useless in a research capacity," is sitting in an armchair with a copy of _The Beacon Hills Daily Mirror_, reading about the drug lords her dad apparently arrested last week.

"Drug lords?" she asks Scott, who is sitting on the ground to her left surrounded by meteorological printouts and a ruler.

He grimaces. "Shamans."

"Are those…easily confused?" Stiles asks. There's a picture of her dad cuffing one of the arrested men on the front cover; he looks like your standard shady customer, and not really someone Stiles would ever pick out of a lineup as a likely contender for a _shaman_. Not that she knows what a shaman is, outside of the D&D class.

"In Beacon Hills, yeah," Scott says. He has a laptop open and is Skyping Lydia Martin for help with the meteorological charts. Stiles had sort of stared when the connection had stopped fuzzing up and she'd gotten her first look at this universe's Lydia, who is a redheaded bombshell and apparently stuck with her sister and father in LA for winter break.

To be fair, Stiles hasn't seen Lydia in years, so there's the possibility that whatever happened in puberty to this Lydia happened to hers as well, but when Stiles had had Lydia for AP Chem six years ago, she had been twelve and spotty and worn her red hair in an unflattering cap that was ruthlessly Spock-like. She'd also been one of the brightest students Stiles had and is likely to ever have, but like most accelerated students, she'd had one friend (Jeff Oppenheimer) and that relationship seemed to have mostly consisted of her tutoring him in exchange for him driving her to school every morning.

"Overlay the mixed layer depth climatology with the map of the ley lines in the preserve," Lydia orders. She looks like she's painting her nails and texting at the same time; apparently Scott has a girlfriend here, instead of the disconcertingly codependent friendship with Isaac that takes up most of his time in Stiles' Beacon Hills, and she's Lydia's best friend. It's comforting to know that at least Lydia Martin is still the most terrifyingly efficient person Stiles has ever met, even if she coordinates her handbag with her belt or whatever big thing is happening in _Cosmo_ these days.

"How did you get this so fast?" Stiles asks. "I got here the day before yesterday; shouldn't this data be unavailable for at least the next two months?"

Scott and Stiles shrug in unison and Derek glowers instead of responding, which is apparently business as usual. Lydia says, voice so icy that Stiles flattens back into her armchair, "The psychopath," and then asks Scott, "Are there overlapping zones?"

Stiles has already met Isaac, Vernon Boyd, and Erica Reyes, who are the other teenage members of this ridiculous posse assembled by Derek for the purposes of supernatural vigilantism or whatever other bullshit reason Derek is using to cover for his obvious loneliness, and while Isaac is clearly unhinged here like he hadn't been back home, she wouldn't have termed either him or Boyd or Erica a psychopath, and Lydia has never been one for imprecision.

"Psychopath?" she asks Derek, even though looking at him directly scores a deep, agonizing line down the center of her chest. Her face feels flushed and her hands are clammy, but she's managed to keep a hold over herself, slippery as it might be, for the past 48 hours by never being alone in a room with him, and there's no reason to break her record now.

Derek stares directly across the room at the doorframe that opens into his miniscule kitchen. He says, "Peter's alive," the way Stiles might yell at her neighbor for letting her gargantuan dog shit in Stiles' front yard and not pick it up.

"You said everyone was dead," Stiles points out, trying not to sound like she's accusing him of anything. Peter had always been one of her favorite of the Hale uncles, but she's not going to exactly hold her breath about him being the same sass-loving guy that has joined Stiles in mercilessly destroying Erin and Natalie at Risk for every Fourth of July picnic since 2002. Besides, if Stiles is going to accuse Derek of anything, it's going to be related to all the teenagers he's drafted into his preternatural cult.

"Yeah, no, Peter died," Scott assures her. "He just didn't stay dead."

Stiles says, "Oh, so it's a family trait," in a breathlessly insensitive fashion, although since the only person she's really hurting here is herself, she decides to let it slide.

Derek says nothing, and Stiles can take a hint, even if she often prefers to ignore them. She opens up the _Daily Mirror_ and starts in on the arts section, which is like three pages long and consists mostly of movie times and stuff out on DVD today. All of the movies listed are the same as the ones back in Stiles' universe. It's amazing to her that so many things could be different and yet others still achingly similar.

"I was kind of hoping there would be at least _something_ I hadn't seen before," she tells Scott.

"That would be kind of awesome," the male Stiles agrees, distracted and still clicking. "Like a new—"

"—Joss Whedon movie," Stiles says in unison. "Wait, did he—"

"No, only 14 episodes," the male Stiles tells her with a frown. "I know, I know, we're all sad and bereft."

Derek huffs out a long, angry breath, which Stiles translates as _Jesus fuck there's two of them now_. She would sympathize, except he apparently got her husband's assholeishness with none of the redeeming qualities like his breathtakingly beautiful smile or his willingness to painstakingly melt peanut butter and pour it over strawberry ice cream for her.

This universe _sucks_, and Stiles now wants ice cream.

"Do you have ice cream?" she asks Derek, and then immediately afterwards she adds, "Wait, who the hell am I kidding? You hate ice cream. Do you have any of that disgusting no-fat bullshit lime custard stuff?"

Derek's face twitches like it doesn't know what to do, which means _yes_.

Stiles puts down the paper and pushes herself out of the armchair; it takes an embarrassingly long amount of time, but until anyone else in the room is eight months pregnant, they can just fucking deal. "Great," she says, and she waddles into the kitchen. It reminds her a lot of their first apartment, where she and Derek had lived for their last two years of Berkeley after Stiles had thrown the bitch-fit to end all bitch-fits about the expense of living in a dorm.

Because she knows Derek, she checks the cabinet to the immediate left of the sink. Sure enough, five Fiestaware bowls that basically have PREVIOUS PROPERTY OF GOODWILL stamped across the side are neatly stacked next to five matching dinner plates. Stiles doesn't hold her breath about an ice cream scoop—Derek doesn't believe in waste, or in having kitchen tools for things you could easily do with something you already have lying around, which is why Stiles has used a corkscrew to core apples for the past eight years—and she's right, but he does have five spoons, nestled inside one another in a drawer underneath the cabinet.

The no-fat bullshit custard has a severe case of freezer burn, but Stiles holds the container over the sink and scrapes the worst of it off, before she dollops approximately half of the pint into her bowl. She's pregnant, and if Derek is the only Hale left here he's totally loaded; he can afford another pint of stupidly healthy fake ice cream.

She's sticking the first spoonful into her mouth and making her way back to the living room when the front door opens and a familiar voice says, "Isn't this appallingly domestic."

Stiles stops in the doorframe. Peter, wearing a leather jacket like there are no other sartorial options in the entirety of Beacon Hills, grins at her lazily. "Knocked up by my nephew, I see." There is something distinctly unhinged about the smile. Against her will, Stiles' pulse kicks up and she shrinks back into the kitchen a little, curling herself around her stomach.

"Not quite," Stiles says, trying to keep her voice steady so she doesn't look like she's cowering. The skin on the back of her neck is crawling and she suddenly doesn't want to be anywhere near Peter, even if he's always been her favorite. She deliberately jerks and dribbles a line of melted custard onto the shirt stretched across her stomach. "Whoops," she says, hands shaking, "silly me. I'm going to wash this off," and then she puts down the ice cream and walks as calmly as she can into the bathroom, where she shuts and locks the door.

She's wearing the same shirt that she fell into this universe wearing, one of Derek's old henleys layered underneath an unbuttoned plaid shirt that will close across her breasts but not her stomach, and she strips off the plaid and then the henley, leaving the former draped across the closed toilet seat as she drops the latter in the sink.

A few minutes later, after she's scrubbed it clean and is waiting for it to dry, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn as close as they can get to her nose, there's a soft knock on the door. "Stiles," Derek says, "I have a shirt you can borrow."

In order to reply, Stiles has to stop shaking. Derek had shown her the wolf thing—with the fangs and the claws—and she'd known intellectually from the vocabulary getting tossed around that the werewolf thing was serious business and involved policing, which is always inherently dangerous, but having Peter in the room had been the first time in this entire multiverse scenario where Stiles had actively been afraid.

Posturing is all good and well when you're a twenty-eight year-old chemistry teacher with nothing to lose, but Stiles is not going to put her baby in the same room as Peter Hale.

She tells Derek this when she manages to get the door open two minutes later; he's standing on the other side of the door, looking uncomfortable and unhappy. "Seriously, not a single _second_," she says as she accepts the shirt from him. It's actually the exact same henley, only this one looks like it's had blood scrubbed out of it recently.

"I understand," Derek says grimly. His eyes are stuck directly in the middle of her forehead, which Stiles realizes a beat too late is because she's not wearing a shirt; the big white expanse of her belly is protruding between them, streaks of purple standing out against the underside. "I'll tell him to leave."

"Good," Stiles says. She tugs the shirt over her head to give Derek some kind of relief, but he's still too tense. "Hey, what's up?" She touches Derek before she has time to list all of the reasons why doing so would be a bad idea, sliding her palm up the line of his forearm. The world gets protracted and slow; Derek's skin is too hot, probably a werewolf thing, but it feels the same. "Is it the pregnant thing? Kind of weird, I know, but it can't be totally unexpected."

Derek, giving his best impression of a cardboard person, just stares at her. "You," he says a beat later, "you smell like them."

All of this smelling business is ridiculous, but Stiles is trying not to be a bitch about it. She's lost Derek, who had been close to her entire world, but Derek has lost _everyone_—his sisters: Erin's bitching and Natalie's long-suffering groans and Laura's bright sarcasm; and his parents: Beatrice and Mark making out in their shared upstairs office like fifteen-year-olds. "It's not the same without you," she admits quietly. "But they try."

"Does—" Derek pauses and breathes out and then says, in a quick rush, "did Edith's baby make it to term?"

Oh Jesus _fuck_. Stiles hadn't realized that Derek had been so young when they'd all died. "Yeah," she says. "Matilda. She's—eight. She wants to play lacrosse professionally."

Derek closes his eyes and minutely shakes his head. "Beacon Hills and fucking lacrosse."

"Don't even get me started on how many idiots I'm expected to pass in my standard chem class each year so they can play first line. _Don't even_," Stiles says. It's an old point of contention. "Matilda soaks that shit up, though, and Jorge's this parody of despair. I think he might sneak into her room and read her Tennyson while she's asleep so she'll absorb at least some culture."

Derek looks like he wants to laugh, but he settles instead for a slightly bitter half-smile. "What did you mean about this not being unexpected?" He gestures his elbow in her tentative direction. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

His curiosity feels kind of delicate, so Stiles puts on an over-exaggerated joking expression and says, "Well, come on, it can't be a total shock that if the universe gave me a uterus I'd be knocked up. Those Hale sperm are some quality swimmers." She almost, _almost_, makes the joke that she's heard out of Laura at least four times a year for the past decade, which is about how many hockey teams the Hales can outfit, but she swallows it back.

Derek's face contorts. "Please don't talk about sperm, Stiles," he says. "Ever."

"Aw," Stiles coos, "is the werewolf embarrassed about a little sex education? It's okay, Derek, I know about your kinks already. I mean, if you need me to sit the male Stiles down and explain to him how silk causes the least amount of chafing, I can totally do that for you—"

Derek turns purple and he growls, "_What, no_," and Stiles cackles, a hand on the top of her belly for balance.

"It's okay," she tells him, squeezing his forearm gently. "You should share stuff like that when you're comfortable, and I know the age thing must be kind of a head-fuck." It feels weird to be giving her husband advice about his sex life with her younger, male doppelganger, but Stiles is mostly surviving this experience by pretending it's happening to someone else, someone who isn't in danger of becoming emotionally attached or who will go back home in a few hours or days and have to face an empty house and the pitying faces of the townsfolk of Beacon Hills.

On a scale of one to superbly effective, it's about a seven, but Stiles has worked in worse situations; she spent her year of student teaching under _Adrian Harris_, after all.

"What are you talking about," Derek demands, forgetting to inflect his voice at all. He's gotten stiff around the shoulders and he's drawing back from her. Stiles forgets about proper distance; she leans forward and digs her nails into his arm because she's touching him and she needs the tether, especially because someone that looks like Peter Hale is in the next room but it is _definitely not Peter Hale_.

"I'm trying to be understanding about the fact that you're fucking a teenager, Derek," Stiles says. "I mean, it's _me_, so I understand, we never could keep our hands off of each other. But seriously? You're twenty-eight. This is kind of unbelievably messed up. If it wasn't me, if I didn't know exactly how I feel about you, I would probably be a little creeped out."

Derek hisses, "I am not _sleeping with Stiles_." His tone would not go remiss in a revival of _Steel Magnolias_, down the horrified way his eyebrows disappear into his hair.

He sounds damaged enough by the thought that Stiles lets him go. "Really?" she says, trying not to let too much skepticism into her voice. "Derek, I have known you for my entire life. I know what you look like when you're in love." She sounds unmistakably bitter; Stiles accordingly swallows and coughs slightly, rubbing her chin with the back of her bent wrist. "Do you mean you haven't told him?"

Pissily, Derek says, "As you so casually pointed out, he is _eighteen_."

"Eighteen's legal," Stiles says, because she's usually the jackass playing devil's advocate.

"He's not—I'm not." Derek stops and takes a deep breath; his nostrils flare and he closes his eyes at whatever he's scenting, obviously trying to process it. "He's eighteen and he doesn't know what he wants."

"Derek," Stiles says, and when he refuses to open his eyes, she hits him in the side of the head with the flat of her palm. "Jerkface, look at me. I'm going to say this slowly because apparently you've recently suffered some kind of neurological disorder: _Stiles wants you_. It doesn't matter if the Stiles in question is an eighteen-year-old dude or a twenty-eight-year-old high school chemistry teacher."

Derek gives her a flat, unimpressed look, but Stiles knows him well enough to see the panic lurking in the corners of his eyes. It's sort of astonishing to her that even though this Derek is broken in so many appalling places that her husband hadn't been, she can still read him like a fucking intro to organic textbook. "There's no way that you can know that," he says, sounding tortured and full of existential angst.

Stiles gives in to the urge to scream, although it's a very little one and she bites it back before it gets too hysterical. "Right, okay, if you want to be miserable for the rest of your life and squat in this shitty apartment with a bunch of teenagers who can barely tolerate you and some psycho _whatever_ possessing your godfather and pretend that you're not in love with him, fine. But no matter what the hell happened here, I know that Beatrice would fucking hate to see you like this."

Derek's hand closes over her throat and he pins her to the thin wall separating the hallway and bathroom so quickly that Stiles hits her head against the plaster with a low _thunk_. "Don't," Derek says, raw and low. "Don't—_do not_ say her name."

He's not actually impeding her ability to breathe—his palm is too much larger than the half-circumference of her throat—so Stiles bares her teeth and says, "It would kill her. Is that why you're doing it? All she's ever wanted has been for you to be happy and maybe to cut your fucking hair once in a while so you don't have to wear so much goddamn gel."

Derek repeats, "Don't," but Stiles talks over him, raising the volume when her voice gets breathy.

"As long as I've known you, your family has been the most important part of your life. The people we went to high school with—Miles and Moira and Wendell—they all grew up and moved out of Beacon Hills and never looked back. But you and me, we were back in town the day after we graduated from Berkeley. We spent three months arguing over paint chips for the living room and you recorded the message for the shop twelve times to get it just right. You care about _everything_."

Derek's hand is shaking under her chin, so she swallows and continues, staring at him baldly as he focuses on the middle of her forehead. "You are _twenty-eight_ years old. Where are your friends your age? Do you really only spend time with your pack? Derek, they're in high school. They know fuck-all and they're still going to know fuck-all until they get out of town and grow up a little bit."

He's trembling too forcefully to keep a grip on her anymore; Stiles presses on the inside of his elbow until his arm bends and he releases her. His huge body is shivering in jerks, like Stiles has tazed him, and she wants to touch him but she knows that it's a stupid, dumb, _dumb_ idea. "I miss you every day. It's worse than when I lost Mom. There is this big fucking hole in my fucking life because the best friend that I have ever had decided to go on a run at ass o'clock in the morning and some drunk fucker was playing live-action Mario Kart on I-5. But you're _alive_ here, so you are going to be fucking happy if it fucking kills you."

Stiles realizes she's crying when the trembling around Derek's body becomes pronounced enough to make the doorframe behind him quiver. All things considered, fifty tearless hours was fairly impressive. Stiles will maybe be congratulating herself about that when she feels less like hollowing her chest out with a blunt spoon.

"Do you understand?" Stiles demands, like she asks her sophomores at the end of their first stoichiometry lecture. They always nod like helpless sheep; it's not their fault, they just have no baseline of comparison. Derek's head jerks up and to the left, which could be a sign of acknowledgement or an aborted headshake. "Great," Stiles says. She plants her elbow in his chest and pushes him away, all the better for her to stomp into his bedroom across the hall. "Good night."

She shuts the door in his face. It's about as satisfying as getting angry at Derek ever gets, which is to say not at all.

* * *

While Stiles appreciates that Derek's little cult/pack is rife with difficulties and drama, she has no compunction about leaning out of the window of the male Stiles' Jeep—other than a huge dent in the passenger door, which had been caused by "miscellaneous supernatural mishap," the male Stiles had told her dismissively, it's a clone of her baby—and shouting, "Is this _really_ the time?"

Scott and Isaac's heads swivel in her direction guiltily. They're keeping up with the Jeep, which is only going about 30 mph, with enough ease that they've apparently decided _now_ is the best time for them to hash out some kind of drama related to Scott's needing to "decide" something related to his relationship with Allison.

"Sorry, Mrs. Hale," Scott calls, recalcitrant.

It says something unflattering about this universe that Scott and Isaac are used enough to running towards disaster to use the travel time to deal with some personal shit. Stiles turns to the male Stiles, who is driving with a determined expression and his hands at two and ten. "How is this even remotely okay."

The male Stiles shrugs but keeps his eyes firmly on the road ahead of him. "You kind of get used to this stuff," he says. "Imminent death. Approaching battle. Witches."

"_Witches_," Stiles mutters under her breath. "Jesus _Christ_."

"Hey, do you kiss Babula with that mouth?" he retorts. "Also, can you not lean out of that window so much? If I hit a pothole you're going to be the first flying whale."

"Fuck you," Stiles says genially. She's definitely inflated, but she's always been skinny so she just sort of looks like she's got an overinflated basketball hiding under Derek's henley. Now that she can hear the worry in his voice, though, she knows what's up with the uncharacteristically safe driving. "Okay, mini-me, if we want to get there in the next year, you need to up the gas. I realize my delicate constitution is misleading, but I'm not actually going to shatter if you go above 45."

"Fuck you," the male Stiles says back, but he incrementally increases their speed, which means Scott and Isaac have to put on an extra burst of speed to follow and can't hash out their CW melodrama anymore. "Normally I'm too interested in bravado to be overly concerned about my personal health, but is it really safe for you to be doing this?"

Stiles assumes he means traveling back across the multiverse while pregnant. "Not like I have much of a choice," she says, striving for cheerful nonchalance. It doesn't fool him, but Stiles doesn't really expect it to; she's always been disgustingly self-aware. "Look, the fact that Derek is alive here makes this probably the best version of the multiverse I've seen in six months, but I—I don't belong here. He's not right for me."

Stiles would give a lot for that not to be true. She'd probably push the male Stiles out of the Jeep right now and take his place in a heartbeat, if this Derek was her Derek. But he's not. She's missed his smile ever since he died, and she still misses it. The male Stiles seems far more patient than she would be about coaxing it out.

Clearing his throat, the male Stiles tightens his grip on the steering wheel and says, faux casually, "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Stiles says. "I'm going to be honest with you, getting threatened has never been a big turn-on for me."

"That's a lie," he interrupts immediately. "That is the _biggest lie ever_."

Stiles admits, "Okay, yeah, it is, but I'm trying to be the bigger person here, okay?" The male Stiles shifts in his seat and nods twice, in a quick jerk, and then he melts enough to give Stiles a grin that she recognizes from when she decides to be a jackass.

"That can't be hard for you," he says. "Are you sure you're not having triplets? Also, seeing me but shorter and pregnant is the biggest mindfuck ever, I hope you appreciate this."

"Dude, you have a _dick_," Stiles says. "What the fuck is up with that. How does that even work."

"Seriously, between werewolves and genitalia you're going with genitalia?" the male Stiles asks.

"Wouldn't you?" Stiles points out. "You totally are, right now. Recognize in me the worst of yourself." She waggles her fingers in his direction and he lets out a surprised bark of laughter.

She knows what he wants to ask, so she lets the conversation fall away after that and waits for him to figure out how to phrase it. They're about twenty minutes out from the witches' nesting ground or coven den or whatever the hell it's called when the male Stiles finally says, apparently giving up on subtlety or beating around the bush, "How do I convince him?"

It's not like there's actual experience that Stiles can draw on about this; she and Derek had been best friends from childhood and they'd basically gone through puberty at the same time and looked at each other and that had been that. It's easily the most boring love story of the entire Hale family. Laura walking up to Ginny at a Hey Marseilles show in Seattle and baldly saying, "You're cute, let's go out," is more interesting than Stiles and Derek's origin story.

But even if this Derek isn't Stiles' husband, it's still Derek Hale. "He's the fucking stubbornest human being on the planet," she tells the male Stiles. "But he likes taking care of people; he loves family. I realize this is a bitch move, but you're still really young, mini-me. You've got time for him to figure his shit out. He needs to do that first, or else anything you guys build together is going to have a shitty foundation."

"Do we have time, though?" the male Stiles asks. "He's a werewolf and I've almost died five times this school year."

"Don't be so dramatic," Stiles says, although she's fairly certain that the male Stiles isn't exaggerating his number of near-death experiences. "If you push him, he'll go hide in his clubhouse."

"Well, subway car," he corrects, "but I guess that's a fair point. God, I'm just so tired of waiting. I know he wants this, wants me."

"Of course he does," Stiles says, popping the collar of her flannel shirt. "We're hot shit, look at us. Anyway, you don't need a degree in Freudian dynamics to see that Derek's got a list of issues longer than the Great Wall of China concerning relationships. I didn't have to deal with those, but I think you'll be okay."

The male Stiles pulls off the road; the Jeep's headlights illuminate a sign labeled _HAIGHT MOUNTAIN NEXT RIGHT_. Stiles can remember being twenty and confused and the heavy dose of self-loathing that had been settling around her shoulders, about the cancer and Mom and looking so much like her that sometimes her dad got a weirdly unfocused look in his eyes, like he was staring past her.

"She smoked because she was in college in the early eighties and people did that kind of stupid shit," Stiles says abruptly. The male Stiles freezes. "It wasn't because of stress or because you were hyperactive and she couldn't handle you. Mom could _always_ handle you."

It's hard to look at him and know that she got an extra ten years with Mom, just because she was born earlier. "Trust me," she says, to the windshield because she can tell he doesn't know what to say. "I know. She didn't stop even after my ADHD got better."

The male Stiles chokes on air next to her; Stiles nods twice, jerkily, and then slips out of the car as Scott and Isaac skid to a halt. "Derek's a mile to the east," Isaac tells her, as Scott, with a concerned and stalwart look on his face, inches towards the driver's side of the car.

Stiles reaches out and grabs the collar of Scott's jacket. "Give him a sec," she says quietly, and then, in her normal speaking volume, "Can one of you run me through this stupidly complex plan again?" It'd taken ten minutes the first time; she figures ten minutes is plenty of time for the male Stiles to get himself together and join them.

She's right; at the eight and a half minute mark, as Scott is using a series of complicated hand signals to explain what's going to happen after they pin the coven of witches down in their bolt hole, the male Stiles opens the door and comes out of the Jeep. His eyes are slightly glossy, but his face is mobile as he says, "Are we explaining this to the old lady _again_?" and Stiles flips him off.

* * *

When Stiles opens her eyes again, the blood from the runes is flaking off of her forehead and she's sitting in the driver's seat of her Jeep—she checks; no dent—parked by the side of the road leading up to the Hale house. It's day again, and when she flips open her phone to check, the date is December 20th.

There's a new text message; it's time-stamped 2:34 PM and reads, _Please tell me you didn't go into labor on some back road in the preserve and are currently cutting the umbilical cord with your teeth_. It's from Laura.

According to the clock on the dashboard of the Jeep, it's 2:40 PM. Since Stiles has service again, she sends back, _No childbirth imminent. I'll be there in twenty minutes_, and drops her phone onto the empty passenger's seat.

If she stops and thinks, letting the space around her filter out, she can see the male Stiles' Derek, his face in an awkward half-frown as Stiles has obligingly allowed a cowering witch to paint her forehead and wrists with runes. "I—I'm sorry," he'd finally said, looking at her stomach deliberately. Since Stiles had never expected to see Derek ever again, let alone for him to apologize for leaving her to raise their child without him, she'd sort of nodded helplessly.

Obviously, Stiles couldn't have stayed with them. The photocopies the male Stiles had hysterically waved in her direction had been very clear about how keeping two of the same person in the same universe was a perfect recipe for an implosion of reality. It hadn't been _her_ Derek. There had been fucking _werewolves_, for fuck's sake. Stiles couldn't leave her dad alone.

Stiles leans forward until her forehead, covered in drying blood, is resting against the top of the steering wheel. She's shaking too hard for real tears; she just manages a couple dry shudders before she swallows compulsively and says, "It-it's Tuesday. I just met a version of you in another universe that was a werewolf."

She pauses and laughs. It sounds broken, so she keeps laughing until it sounds like she's actually amused. "I know. A _werewolf_. What the actual fuck. Apparently it was a family thing. Can you imagine Erin as a wolf? I'd fear for the safety of the universe at large."

From this position, she can watch her hands come around to rest against her belly, her palms smoothing down the knitted fabric of the other Derek's henley. "I know I never say it, but I think the words are kind of important to me. I took it for granted, that you would be around for the rest of my life and I wouldn't have to say it."

She presses her hands until she can feel her wedding ring indent the skin of her stomach. "I miss you, Derek," she says, and she has to exert an obscene amount of control over her voice to keep it from breaking too badly. "I'm going to miss you for the rest of my life. I'm sorry that I haven't said it before."

The baby shifts restlessly and a small foot kicks out against Stiles' left hand. "_Oomph_," she grunts. "Ow, Jesus, okay, yeah, I'm paying attention to you, too. Thanks for not making me puke for the past two days. I really appreciate it." Since that sounds too sarcastic and Stiles is never going to tempt fate ever, ever again, lest she end up in a universe with, like, fish people or something, she adds, "No, really, that was sincerely meant."

The baby settles and Stiles has at least twelve minutes until Erin comes barreling in a well-meaning panic down the road in Beatrice's pick-up and the shirt still smells like Derek, a little, like Garnier and Tide and cedar, so Stiles closes her eyes again and just—breathes. "I miss you," she repeats, and it hurts just as much, but it's a little cleaner this time. "Oh god, do I miss you, you asshole."


End file.
